A Democratic Congress may be the best means of getting our troops home, but in the meantime, while we celebrate, they're still serving under fire.

Which is why I recommend to you one of my favorite charities: anysoldier.com

http://anysoldier.com/...

on which you'll find the addresses of soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan requesting stuff for their units: books, CDs, DVDs, magazines, toiletries, etc.

So what one thing would get you out of Bush's military?  Why, the Republican-protected Pay Day Loan Industry.

Thousands of U.S. troops are being barred from overseas duty because they are so deep in debt they are considered security risks, according to an Associated Press review of military records.

On the most ridiculous grounds imaginable, Republicans have decided that being in debt is such a threat that you can't serve.  Do they really believe that Iraqis are going to be sneaking up to American soldiers, offering them bundles of dinars for information?  The idea is ludicrous.

But there's one thing for sure: Republicans wouldn't want someone who owed their buddies in the payday loan business over in Iraq where they might get hurt.  Much better to keep them home where they can pay off that triple digit interest.

Now that North Korea has confirmed nukes, the U.S. and South Korea have finally decided to create a plan on how to deal with the situation.

According to the report, the United States is considering a plan against North Korea to neutralize Pyongyang's nuclear capability with overwhelming use of the U.S. Air Force.

Under the envisaged plan, U.S. combat aircraft and bombers... would conduct "surgical strikes'' on major weapons of mass destruction (WMD) facilities, training sites, and intelligence and communication facilities in the North instead of ground forces advancing into the North, the report said.

Currently, the Operations Plan -- OPLAN 5027, the joint U.S. contingency plan with South Korea, accounts for a conflict involving conventional weapons:

[Alternate Title: Bush Weakness Empowers North Korea, Iran, and Russia to Action]

International leaders have begun to notice a widening crevice between the Bush Administration's persistent gunboat diplomacy and their realistic ability to follow through.

They see that President Bush has wedged the U.S. Military -- and thus U.S. national security -- between Iraq and a hard place.

As long as we're strapped to Iraq, they know that Bush's actions have impaled both the quality and quantity of America's diplomatic and military options.

And now they're taking advantage of that weakness.

Eliminating U.S. Options

When the Bush Administration first invaded Iraq, they believed the incursion would largely fit the template for which our current military was designed -- based on the belief that extended combat operations were an anachronism. More precisely they expected:

I'd decided to get out of the Air Force after serving two four-year terms. In the final months of my commitment, I went in to fill out some paperwork. The clerk said "You've got about two months of leave stored up. Do you want to take terminal leave or do you want us to pay you for the time?"

I asked "What's the difference?" Well, for 14,000 Army vets, and now about 2,500 Marine veterans, the answer is now all too clear. Call it a backdoor draft.

Watching Mr Rumsfeld on Larry King live, just made my blood boil, after being disabled by actions he approved of as Chief of Staff and as the Secretary of Defense in 1974 and 1975. I admit I do not have much use for him or his right hand man, Dick Cheney, for those of you who are not aware of it, they became a team in the Office of Economic Opportunity in the Nixon Administration and it was a Cabinet level post. Cheney was so good at doing what he did, that when Rumsfeld was named Secretary of Defense in 1975, Cheney became the White House Chief of Staff for President Ford, gaining his own seat on the National Security Council due to the promotion.

On Friday afternoon in a small room in Washington DC a Commission that is empaneled as a BI-Partisan Committee voted 11-2 to investigate the effects of totally disabled veterans who receive both VA Compensation and Social Security Disability, some of them receive these payments for the same service connected injuries, and some like myself receive them for totally unrelated reasons.

But the intent of this commission is to find out how much they get and to determine what is "fair". Let's discuss fair, you have 240,000 totally disabled veterans who receive both payments, but remember these are the most disabled of veterans, they can not work at all. Cutting their income will be devastating to the veterans and their families, in some cases probably causing bankruptcy's

This was posted today at Kos, dealing with PTSD and how DOD, the VA and Congress is failing in their obligation to care for the active duty service members and veterans they are creating in the new WW3 as dumya calls it  the rest of us call it PNAC's war.

The Iraq War PTSD Epidemic

The Bush White House and the Rubber-Stamp GOP-controlled Congress have launched so many assaults against the American people that I have lost count. But perhaps the most offensive of these assaults are against the military, military families and veterans.  President Bush saw fit to send our soldiers into an unnecessary war, using misleading intelligence. He then refused to properly protect the them in battle, provide the necessary medical care when they were redeployed homeward, and finally denied them and their families the financial security they have earned fighting for our nation.

President George W. Bush is expected to announce this evening that he will deploy National Guard troops to the Mexican border to try to stop illegal immigration.

While it really is intended to provide a photo opportunity for Bush to show he is doing something, the move goes beyond his immediate political goal of trying to save GOP House seats, the real problem is it further increases the militarization of the United States.

And while he'll get the credit, it'll be the governors of the border states that are left holding the responsibility when, not if, an encounter between soldiers results in people crossing the border being harmed.

How many military people, military families do you know? If you're like the majority of Americans, the answer is probably, "Not many."

Back during World War II, chances were pretty high that you and your family (if none of you were serving yourselves) were well-acquainted with some of the men and women serving overseas at the time. Because 25% of America's WWII-era men served overseas (12 million in uniform from a nation of 130 million), the plight of the military family was well known and the struggles they faced were clearly visible through the lens of shared experience.  

That's no longer the case.

Today, 1.3 million Americans have served in Iraq culled from a nation of 300 million. Chances are most of us don't know anyone serving overseas. Many of us might have difficulty in honestly empathizing or understanding what it's like to be a member of a military family left behind. And it might be all too easy to forget that these people desperately need our advocacy and help.

Why you should vote anti-republican in 2006 and 2008, I never thought I would be saying those  words myself. I am a military man, thru and thru, I joined the Army at age 18 in 1973, I served this nation from the Vietnam War era, served on the DMZ in South Korea, armed combat patrols, border incidents.I went to Germany and saw the Cold War up close and personal, the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, the feeling of impending doom from the Soviet Union. I left the Army in 1982 after helping  establish this nation's desert warfare training center at NTC Fort Irwin.

Facts after the fold.......................

Multimillion dollar cold war style weaponry; absolutely. Body armor and working equipment for our troops; not so much.

Ralph Peters's recent column in the New York Post (or here) lays bare the anatomy of the very "military industrial complex" that a tough old soldier known as Ike warned us about many years ago. Writes Peters:

Our ground forces are being driven hard, with many soldiers and Marines already on their third assignments to Iraq or Afghanistan. Overwhelmingly, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps do the bleeding and dying. And even as we're able to gradually reduce our troop levels in Iraq, the need for robust land forces to cope with other looming crises is indisputable.

Yet, instead of beefing up the forces that do the actual fighting, the Pentagon self-justification process known as the "Quadrennial Defense Review," or QDR, is about to call for increasing the buy of the F/A-22, a pointless air-to-air fighter with a $280-million-per-copy price tag, while acquiring high-tech destroyers designed to defeat a vanished Soviet navy.

Two from the Christian Science Monitor that should be required reading for anyone debating the "situation in Iraq":

Iraq Story: how troops see it.
BROOK PARK, OHIO - Cpl. Stan Mayer has seen the worst of war. In the leaves of his photo album, there are casual memorials to the cost of the Iraq conflict - candid portraits of friends who never came home and graphic pictures of how insurgent bombs have shredded steel and bone.

Yet the Iraq of Corporal Mayer's memory is not solely a place of death and loss. It is also a place of hope. It is the hope of the town of Hit, which he saw transform from an insurgent stronghold to a place where kids played on Marine trucks. It is the hope of villagers who whispered where roadside bombs were hidden. But most of all, it is the hope he saw in a young Iraqi girl who loved pens and Oreo cookies.
. . . . .
 "What the national news media try to do is figure out: What's the overall verdict?" says Brig. Gen. Volney Warner, deputy commandant of the Army Command and General Staff College. "Soldiers don't do overall verdicts."

And on the difference in approach between American and Iraqi forces:

Two Views.

NEW OBEIDI, IRAQ - Iraqi Army Capt. Khalid Hussein grew impatient as he explained what seemed like the obvious.
"They are the enemy," he says, exasperated, to his American counterpart. "They killed my friends."

Marine Capt. Clinton Culp doesn't waver. "I know sir. I've lost men, too. But if we beat [up] the enemy, then we are no better than him."

"Support our troops" means understanding - and publicizing - the way they perform the tasks they've been assigned.

Res ipsa loquitor, from the LAT, via MarineLink articles on OIF:

WASHINGTON -- Jacqui Coffman lives literally in the shadow of Ft. Stewart, Ga., headquarters of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division. She can see the gates from the windows of her house.

Her husband, Maj. Ross Coffman, is gone these days, serving his third tour of duty in Iraq. Every month she gathers with other military wives to talk about what's on their minds: kids, money, their husbands' safety overseas.

[edit]

But Coffman said she considered words tossed around in Washington far less important than the support she feels daily for herself and her three young daughters from the community around Ft. Stewart.

That support has been so evident and unwavering that Coffman said she considered the growing debate over the war a healthy exercise in democracy.

With thanks to another coupla women:  Maura Reynolds and Faye Fiore, Times Staff Writers.

I am putting this up as is for discussion.

   

  First Periodical Report of Monitoring Net of Human Rights in Iraq (link to full MHRI document)

  MHRI – November 23, 2005  Baghdad

               

                The Monitoring Network for Human Rights (MHRI), which consists   of more than 20 Iraqi organizations for Human Rights, made this report about the crimes and continuous   violations of human rights in Iraq.

               

                1.      Crimes of War and Crimes Against Humanity 

               

                -  First crime:

               

                Some of the ugliest      crimes committed by the occupation forces and by Iraqi military units are the ones committed in the city of      Fallujah in the battles of November 2004, and which we summarize in the following: